Jim Euchner, Research-Technology Management Vol. 63, Issue 3, From the Editor

I was watching You’ve Got Mail the other day, that not-so-old movie that had as its backdrop the creative destruction of the corner bookstore. The category-killer chain at the center of that movie’s plot had introduced a new business model that was simply much better than that of the mom-and-pop bookstore. One after one the independent bookstores were being driven out of business.

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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

—Richard Feynman

In Shakespearean literature, the court jester is the only person who can speak truth to power. It is the jester in King Lear, for example, who provides critical insight to the king, and he is able to do so only because of his special license to speak freely, even about things the monarch does not want to hear.

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Jim Euchner, From the Editor, Research-Technology Management Vol. 62.1

Change before you have to.

-Jack Welch

 

I moved recently and, as a result, had occasion to go through boxes of old papers that had been buried in my basement for many years. I have had a long career in innovation, so some of the documents were papers about the secrets of a few innovation icons: Xerox, Lucent, Kodak, and Enron. Those papers are a stark reminder of how little we yet understand about sustained corporate innovation. Each of these companies was an innovation giant in its day. But with the exception of Xerox, which is a shadow of its former self, all of them are out of business or absorbed by others.

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Early in my career, as part of a corporate culture exercise, I was introduced to the nine-dot problem. By now almost anyone connected with R&D or innovation has seen it. The challenge is to connect nine dots organized as a grid, using only four lines, without lifting your pencil. The group that I was part of for this exercise was an artificial intelligence lab, and the members seemed to be more driven to challenge the boundaries of the puzzle than to solve it. Most people solved the four-line version rather quickly. Then someone declared that he could do it with three lines (taking advantage of the large dimensions of the dots on the puzzle to skew lines through their edges); someone else claimed he could solve the puzzle with one line and did so by making a cylinder of the playing board and using a slightly askew line circling many times around the cylinder to hit all the dots; finally, someone said he could solve it with zero lines (one point) and folded the paper so that all the dots aligned, one above the other. He stabbed the stack of dots. Done!

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Jim Euchner, From the Editor, Vol 61.5

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things.

—Neil Gershenfeld

The Internet of Things (IoT) has taken on many meanings. In manufacturing, it means instrumenting and informating factories so that data can be used to improve quality and productivity. In logistics, it means a unique identifier for individual items so that supply chains can be made more intelligent. In new product development, it means the development of smart, connected products that provide information about their state so that information can be used to improve the operations the products support. It can also mean the use of information to broaden the traditional design space for a product. Finally, for manufacturers, IoT means the proliferation of data-based business models, especially those that sell products as services.

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